So imagine getting out of bed to behold the hashtag #HumFitToIndiaFit
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We had barely recovered from that advertisement for breakfast cereal where Madhuri Dixit cruelly makes her entire family work out as soon as they get out of bed. So imagine getting out of bed to behold the hashtag #HumFitToIndiaFit.
It's not that I am against fitness at all. I think it's a worthwhile aspiration. For instance, the couple of years I was a regular at an Iyengar Yoga class count as good ones in my life. Learning to understand your body - how breath works, how muscles function, where strength resides, why balance matters and how it is tied to the mind and spirit - is beautiful. It is a holistic wisdom we should all have about our bodies in order to look after them. A hard walk among lovely trees - for example, in Aarey Colony, which the government is so keen to decimate - fills you with well-being. The morning after a night spent drinking and dancing hard, as opposed to merely drinking, is all the proof the exercise pudding needs if you know what I mean.
But as regular readers of this column may remember, I have a deep suspicion of fitness fanatics. My reasons are many. The first is boredom. Vegans extolling the virtues of berries and nuts and hearty exercise nuts - yes, I note the common factor of nuts - tend to be monomaniacs. Their conversation is an endless litany of do's and don'ts, yaniki it's all a version of left-right-left-daine-bayen-tham. The only other emotion they induce in you is guilt and defensiveness. They may think they are aglow with health, but frankly, I suspect it's the heightened flush of missionary zeal as they try to convert you. They will browbeat you till, like with any cult you curse all your old habits, indulge in a good round of chest-beating about how misled you have been, then declare you have seen the light and are born again. Fanatics believe theirs is the solution to everything from acne to angst.
Resist and that just makes you a weak, spineless type. The suryanamaskar never sets on the fitness empire. The hashtag #HumFitToIndiaFit has something of this self-satisfied stentorian quality. Its communication is fundamentally that if we just work out a little our problems will all be over. In other words it puts the onus of our well being on citizens. In this it is akin to the Swachh Bharat discourse where people are accused of having bad habits and svachhta – cleanliness - is made the focus instead of toilets - necessities. Here, fitness glibly obscures the larger issue of health and well-being, tied as those things are to poverty, nutrition, toilet access, subsidised medical health care and other responsibilities of governments we never hear much about.
There is a tremendous irony, but also a double unkindness in the fact that the Prime Minister and other ministers are rising to this building WhatsApp-group type challenge at the precise moment when citizens have been shot dead in Thokuddi/Tuticorin for protesting against the pollution, ground water poisoning and health hazards caused by the Sterlite factory's copper smelting plant.
But perhaps the campaign is simply honest. Hum fit, it says, not tum fit. It tags politicians, movie stars and sports stars. No confusion here who fits into this hum-nation definition and who doesn't.
Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at www.parodevipictures.com
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